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I still have more core functionality and a little surprise up my sleeve.

After that my focus will be on tightening and optimizing the code, things have gotten a little big and I'd like to fix that ... At the same time there are quite a few apps I want to write, including a front end to the compiler and a couple of things I rather keep under wraps for now.

including CInvoke or alien (alien supports now all murgaLua supported platforms)
including bitlib or something similar.

Have you looked at luasys? While there is an overlap with functionality already in murgaLua there are a few intresting things in it. The mem part, the io part, event and thread. Also rings could be a cool thing.

This way the offscreen buffer could be manipulated directly. Immutable strings are a real pain in the butt for image manipulation. (O.K. as long a there are pixel functions available it isn't that big of a problem)

I also still can't add anything to the main fltk event loop (Fl.add_idle() and co. are missing).

Also there is some (fltk) functionality that can't be accessed in murgaLua. It might be possible to add functions to register lua wrapper functions as virtual functions. for example my_widget:register(resize,myresize) or something in that direction.

Juergen

BTW.: I don't know if I'm the only one, who has that problem, but readline seems still broken in murgaLua 0.6.6

my focus will be on tightening and optimizing the code, things have gotten a little big and I'd like to fix that ...

There doesn't seem to be many people around these days who think like John Murga.

During the 1970s, I worked on an application that was revolutionary for the time and saved a lot of disk space and other resources. The idea made a lot of money (for other people, not me). It was a fun product to work on and made life better for people working in the computer industry.

More recently, I worked for a company that would tell people to buy a new computer if they had performance or disk space problems. That solution has gotten more plausible as hardware has improved and gotten less expensive. Still, it's sad that this has become the mindset for many software developers.

My personal favorite long-term direction for murgaLua would be more of a slant towards multimedia. Still I miss some truly free alternative to Adobe Flash. I did some experiments (e.g., a closer look at luacairo, Pixeltoaster, portaudio, rtaudio) and a little bit of web research lately, but did not come up with a suitable proposal for lightweight yet powerful multimedia extensions for murgaLua yet.
I'd like to have the following features:
- fast yet high quality 2D vector graphics (cairo/luacairo is too slow for realtime animations)
- audio (portaudio/rtaudio both seem ok but lack any file format binding - wav, ogg/vorbis, or mp3)
- video (no idea yet)
- also murgaLua lacks platform-independent printing support. This is hard to achieve, I know...

If someone knows of suitable libraries for these purposes which ideally even offer lua bindings, I would be very pleased to know.

More recently, I worked for a company that would tell people to buy a new computer if they had performance or disk space problems. That solution has gotten more plausible as hardware has improved and gotten less expensive. Still, it's sad that this has become the mindset for many software developers.

While this might take things a little off topic, I completely agree with you. My computer (1.8ghz cpu, 512mb ram) is not the latest hardware, but as far as I'm concerned it should be more than enough to easily handle typical processing that most people want for daily use. Not long ago I was using a 550mHz cpu that accomplished everything I needed without much lag (gaming was an issue in some occasions, but that was all). Unfortunately there is a great focus on making all applications *bling*, which in most cases is useless and a huge waste of system resources.

As long as you can see a noticeable difference in performance between various widget sets, I will always opt for the lighter. When hardware improves to the point where unnecessary eyecandy response is no more noticeably slow than fltk, I'll consider using it.

Bitlib will be in, but I have been having trouble getting Alien to work properly on Win32 due to the fact I use GCC/MingW (works great on Mac/Linux).

Juergen Wrote:

Have you looked at luasys? While there is an overlap with functionality already in murgaLua there are a few intresting things in it. The mem part, the io part, event and thread. Also rings could be a cool thing.

Maybe some of the mem, io and event stuff may be interesting ... But I want to shy away from providing functionality that is too complex of troublesome ... Threads for instance, they are cool, but will prove VERY problematic when used with FLTK and other things, so I rather leave them out.

Juergen Wrote:

This way the offscreen buffer could be manipulated directly. Immutable strings are a real pain in the butt for image manipulation. (O.K. as long a there are pixel functions available it isn't that big of a problem)

Better memory/buffer handling is on the list.

Juergen Wrote:

I also still can't add anything to the main fltk event loop (Fl.add_idle() and co. are missing).

Let me know what other functions you need are missing.

Juergen Wrote:

Also there is some (fltk) functionality that can't be accessed in murgaLua. It might be possible to add functions to register lua wrapper functions as virtual functions. for example my_widget:register(resize,myresize) or something in that direction.

That would be nice for quite a few things, but currently it would require me to profoundly change things, although I'll have a think about how I'd go about doing that ... Without making things too complex.

Juergen Wrote:

BTW.: I don't know if I'm the only one, who has that problem, but readline seems still broken in murgaLua 0.6.6

The dynamic binaries in the "otherBuilds" should have readline enabled ... At least, they did when I last tested.

The dynamic binaries in the "otherBuilds" should have readline enabled

Quote:

Oh, and readline support is present in the static Linux builds

I know I tested the static non-xft in DSL, so if it's actually the dynamic build that has readline I understand why it didn't work.
I *thought* I'd tested the dynamic build in Slackware, but I see now that the file is 605k, which couldn't be the right one. I'll try the other next time i'm in slackware.

Yeah, I tested murgaLua_Dynamic in Slackware 12, and readline works great.

I was kinda hoping that I could test FLTK widgets in interactive mode, but so far I've only succeeded in displaying an empty window or a non-interactive dialog. But that's a minor issue that doesn't really matter to me. It's just as easy to test widgets in a script as usual.

This will allow you to call functions from DLLs, .so and .dylibs directly from murgaLua.

This sounds like it's probably a huge bonus, but honestly I'm not sure what it means...no "real" programming knowlege here, so I have no clue how dynamic libraries are accessed. I don't even know how to access Lua modules =o)

It seems like murgaLua could theoretically have unlimited capabilities through the use of C libs?